MUSK AMOK IN EUROPE AND AFRICA
November 25, 2022 -Durt Fibo

A mere 4 days after the grand opening of the Twitter headquarters in Accra, the capital of Ghana, Elon Musk has fired all but one employee there. The expunged workers have taken their case to the Ministry of Labor, and have hired a lawyer, Carla Olympio, who told CNN that “little attempt appears to have been made to comply with Ghana’s labor laws.” With this latest impulsive act, Musk has cratered Twitter’s ability to function in what was probably it’s most active sub-Saharan region.

This comes immediately after Twitter closed its European headquarters and dismissed the staff via yet another Musky email. The company’s Brussels office had been responsible for Twitter’s market as well as compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Twitter, like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, has its EU business legally anchored in Ireland for beneficial tax positioning, but this has them under the watchful eye of Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data protection chief, as the head regulator for all their conduct within the EU. An overworked Dixon recently told the press: “We’re now proactively engaging [with Twitter] and asking, ‘look, there is a lot of reporting around changes to verified accounts and blue ticks and phishing accounts. What risk assessments are being run and what are the implications for European users?” Her tasks were somewhat more directly outlined last week, when the EU vice president, Margrethe Vestager, defined Musk’s new business model as “totally imperfect.”